In Past Show

The Real and The Fake series are a set of still-life photographs that contemplate the death of food. They are Hartʼs response to surreal trips down the aisles of her local supermarket, where the opportunity to buy anything that is not highly artificial or toxic is severely limited. The Real and The Fake photos are classical still lives of nutritionally-empty industrial snack-foods that nevertheless have appealing Platonic forms. Photos of these fake real foods are integrated with obviously simulated computer graphics of apples. In these images, the real and the fake implode. They are representations that are fake but seem real, and are real but seem fake. Their style is also a hybrid, bridging between classical still-life painting - Cezanne's apples! - and an industrial product shot.

About Claudia Hart

Claudia Hart’s works juxtapose the futuristic and the classical, combining 3-D animation software with such canonical images as the nude female form and still lifes of apples. Hart presents themes of death and the inevitable ravages of time, offset by a vision of an alternate technological universe in which plastic bodies elude decay. Though patently artificial, the figures in Hart’s film installations emote in a recognizably human way as they are put through often agonizing processes involving containment and atrophy. For the series “PhotoMortifications” (2007-2009), Hart superimposed 3-D images of decomposing statues on to photographs of large modern public interiors. In a similar interplay between artifice and authenticity, “The Real and the Fake” (2011) features photographed edibles of questionable nutritional value with computer-generated images of flawless apples, inspired by the decline in the quality of food.